7 Tips for Getting The Most Out of Your Viraltag Subscription

I’m sharing a review for Viraltag, an affordable and effective social media scheduling tool for bloggers and other online crafts business owners, along with my 7 tips for getting the most out of your subscription, so read on for details!

This post contains affiliate links. I may receive compensation (at no added cost to you) if you make a purchase using these links. I used a free trial and will receive a free subscription to Viraltag for writing this post. Although I accept free products for review, I don’t guarantee a positive review. My reviews are based entirely on my honest opinions.

At the end of every year, I reassess my businesses and look for ways to improve and grow in the following year. One of my goals for this is year is to lower my business expenses. It’s not always easy to continue to increase your sales year after year, so decreasing costs is a great way to increase cash flow (or your profits) when your sales are flat or increasingly slowly. (You can read more of my tips for turning your crafts hobby into a business in this post.)

First on my list for lowering costs was analyzing all of the subscriptions I was using for my businesses. Subscriptions have historically been a problem area for me because I always choose the annual plans when there is a discount from paying month-to-month, and once the bill for the year has been paid, it’s easy to forget about the service or not maximize your use of it until you’re hit with a big bill in the following year. For that reason, finding a replacement for Hootsuite was at the top of my list for this year. I had been using it for several years, and while it was easy to use for social media post scheduling, I was never satisfied with the auto-scheduling and it was far too expensive for the reach I was getting.

Rhondda talked about using Viraltag for Pinterest and Instagram but the one subscription I was satisfied with is Tailwind (which I used to grow my Instagram and Pinterest following and which also offers a free trial without credit card). For that reason, I put Viraltag on hold for a few months and started scheduling Facebook posts directly from my pages and using IFTTT applets to share those posts with images on Twitter. I was so busy with my new job that I didn’t have much time to think about alternative options.

That changed back in April when I attended the Snap! conference and we had an impromptu crochet blogger get-together between sessions. You can see a few of us hanging out in this picture.

Of course, we shared what was working in our businesses and Bethany from Whistle and Ivy mentioned that she uploading photos to her Facebook page rather than choosing one of the images that is automatically pulled from a link. This seemed to have a positive impact on her reach. Since a large percentage of the traffic to Underground Crafter comes from Facebook, I’m always looking for ways to increase my reach. I decided to try her suggestion, and it did improve my reach. However, the IFTTT applet no longer auto-shared my posts, so my Twitter account started looking like a barren wasteland. I was back on the hunt for an affordable social media scheduling tool. I decided to finally dedicate the time to trying out Viraltag and I’m so glad I did!

7 Tips for Getting The Most Out of Your Viraltag Subscription

Commit to Getting the Most Out of Your Trial

Don’t start your free trial until you’re ready to use actually use Viraltag. Think of the trial as a 14-day training period and aim to be an expert by the time it ends. I was able to get an extension to my free trial by contacting customer service because I hit some road blocks at work and wasn’t able to maximize my trial time.

Add Your Evergreen Content

If you’ve been making, designing, and/or blogging for more than a minute, you have an archive of great stuff. We’re all so concerned with sharing our latest posts and trying to maximize the launch of each new blog post, pattern, or handmade project that it’s easy to forget about the older stuff.

Viraltag makes this easier because you can upload your evergreen archives and they will post automatically whenever you have a free spot in your schedule.

As you schedule each new post, you can also indicate if that it is evergreen. This is a huge time-saver for the me because I was manually scheduling evergreen posts every day for Underground Crafter and twice a week for Creative Yarn Entrepreneur.

Set Up Your Schedule

It’s easy to set up your own schedule in Viraltag. You can use the same schedule for each connected network or change it.

You can also add categories to your schedule. This is helpful for me because I like to post a mix of content for Underground Crafter including crochet, knitting, crafts, and recipes. Now I don’t have to manually schedule a time for each category. I can just add it to my queue, select a category, and it will automatically be placed into the right position.

Choose the Best Pictures for Each Platform

When I’m sharing my own content, I want it to look fabulous because I’m really hoping to get people to click through to my own posts. You have 7 options for uploading images to each Viraltag post (from your computer, Facebook, DropBox, web link, Flickr, Google Drive, or Instagram). I can choose different images or aspect ratios for posts on Facebook and Twitter, which is great.

Join Circles

If you’re not already part of an community that shares content and you want to add relevant posts by other crafters to your feed, you can join interest-based Circles and share content from there. I already have a method to my social sharing madness, but this looks like a good feature to use when I don’t have a lot in the queue.

Use Affiliate Links to Pay for Your Subscription

Unlike most other social media schedulers, everyone who is a Viraltag member is automatically part of the affiliate program. Just click on the heart in the upper right corner of the dashboard to get your affiliate link. People who use the link get a $15 credit, and you can earn a 20% monthly commission for each person you invite who subscribes. Just remember to properly disclose that are using affiliate links (and to use my affiliate link if you plan to try Viraltag!).